SOURCE: “Worried Celebrants of the American Revolution,” in American Literature 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years, edited by Everett Emerson, University of Wisconsin Press, 1977, pp. 275-91.

In the following excerpt, Tichi studies the concerns of Adams, who, along with Benjamin Rush and Mercy Otis Warren, worried about the accurate historical representation of the events of the American Revolution.

I

In 1815, eleven years before the jubilee of the American Revolution, John Adams began a letter to Jefferson with three crucial questions: “Who shall write the history of the American revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?” Adams probably expected the very answer he got from Monticello within a month. “Nobody,” said Jefferson, arguing that because congressional proceedings on the Revolution had occurred in camera without extant records of participants, “the life and soul of history must for ever be unknown.” Adams well knew how fragile...